STARWEST 2017 - Test Automation Engineer

Sunday, October 1

Learn the role of the tester in an agile team and explore agile testing processes in an interactive workshop. Successful attendees earn the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Testing (ICP-TST) designation. This course is also accredited for the ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Extension exam.

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification. Find out what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, exploratory testing, and more.

Explore a proven approach for designing a consistent and repeatable set of optimized test cases. Learn and practice cause-effect graphing and alternative test design approaches, and take back a lifecycle testing process that incorporates testing as an integrated part of the development project.

Gain the knowledge and skills to use the latest testing tools provided by HP to validate decisions and improve software performance. Participants are equipped to begin planning the implementation of LoadRunner® and Performance Center for improving testing practices within their organizations.

Monday, October 2

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically-thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...

Selenium expertise, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. Many believe it is a must-have tool for test engineers. If you want to learn Selenium, then this tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, work with JavaScript...

When we discover—often late in an automation effort—that the automated tests are cumbersome and costly to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem for the automator to solve. However, an often-overlooked cause is the role that testers who designed these tests play in making automation scalable and maintainable. In this interactive tutorial for both testers and automation engineers, Hans Buwalda explores how better test designs not only will result in much improved test automation but also can make the difference between automation success and failure. See why successful...

In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series, How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against mobile and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software. Like different kinds of software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be...

We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. But Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Cucumber and SpecFlow, two tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to...

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product...

You've seen this before. The project requirement states that You will be responsible for developing test automation that covers ______. And it is rarely as simple as it first seems. With upstream and downstream considerations, tool changes, and course correction at every juncture, how can you possibly improve efficiency and quality, and still plan for and stay on target during the process of developing and implementing a robust test automation harness? Dawn Code will guide you through the steps of building test automation that can suit a variety of needs. Following a Choose Your Own...

With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments that must be made when developing an automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and often best their commercial equivalents―not only in cost but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep up with...

Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a manager, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are new to automation. Dot helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on system...

Tuesday, October 3

With Git and GitHub, testers today have unprecedented visibility into both development and DevOps code. GitHub provides powerful online collaboration, code review, code management, and version control services. GitHub's domination of social coding makes it the professionals’ new business card, indicating their creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Today’s testers need to learn about and use Git and GitHub. In this hands-on tutorial Wilson Mar presents material available nowhere else and a unique explanation of tools, repositories, and GUI programs used by professional...

As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset—from the almost infinite number of tests available—that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases randomly. Learn to selectively...

No longer just a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong presence in our world even today. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes—Jennifer Bonine says that the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Testing, product management, and development teams must address developing and testing in this paradigm. Testers, accustomed to traditional platforms, are now asked to test on more complex devices and more advanced platforms. Testers must keep up with the...

Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing v. quality and balancing both the team’s and your focus still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile automation...

Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to generic technical reasons, which can be fixed with relative ease. Solutions that have worked well for others are patterns; these test automation patterns are common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Dot Graham focuses on often-neglected technical issues—i.e., non-management issues—and the patterns that help solve them. These are not development or code patterns—this is a code-free tutorial. Using a set of patterns...

Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing essential in a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements. Explore effective test techniques for assuring that...

You have just been assigned a new testing project. Where do you start? How do you develop a plan and begin testing? How will you report on your progress? Paul Holland shares new test project approaches that enable you to plan, test, and report effectively. Paul demonstrates ideas, based on the Heuristic Software Test Model from Rapid Software Testing that can be directly applied or adapted to your environment. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll be given a product to test. Start by creating three raw lists—product coverage outline, potential risks, and test ideas—that help ensure...

Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Well, setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test design principles—applicable to...

Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking,...

Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just not the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum and see where...

Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all features were covered and all tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Dawn shows you how—by expanding basic tests and incorporating specific...

In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/...

In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and no consideration for how to integrate the tools. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on...

Are you a tester, developer, or quality engineer who participates in code reviews or unit testing activities? Can you write test scripts to cover all program statements but would like to learn more advanced code-based testing techniques? Join Tariq King as he goes beyond the basics of unit testing and shows you how to design tests that cover multiple data conditions, independent paths, and loops within code. Learn how to apply these techniques to different application tiers, ranging from the user interface to the data access layer. Discover strategies for integration testing based on...

In today’s environment, the user experience (UX) is overwhelmingly important—and is not just about the product. UX describes all facets of a person’s interactions with and reactions to the product, the organization that supplies it, and the environment in which it is experienced. Isabel Evans says that in order to focus our tests appropriately, it is vital that we testers understand our users’ experiences. We need to explore and measure human, business, and societal impacts of products we develop, and how those are underpinned by technical qualities. Unless we “shift left” as...

Let’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure the awesomeness of your mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The...

Wednesday, October 4

The state of the art in automated software testing is far from being a replacement for human-guided testing. There is more to testing than setting up preconditions, applying inputs, verifying outputs, and logging the results. Testing requires significant planning, exploring, learning, modeling, inferencing, experimenting, and more. Therefore, before we can truly automate testing, we must bridge the gap between the testing capabilities of humans and machines. Tariq King says that breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are challenging our thinking about the...

The DevOps movement is here. Now, companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay...

A startup is an organization created to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Approximately 40 percent of all startups will cease operation with investors losing everything; 95 percent will fall short of their financial projections. And the number one cause of startup failure? No one wants to buy their product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, learned that under conditions of extreme uncertainty, classical management methods do not bring success. Based on his and others’ experiences, he formulated the Lean Startup methodology consisting of five...

Mike Cohn’s Test Pyramid describes a test automation strategy consisting of a wide base of unit tests, service-oriented acceptance tests for business logic, and a thin layer of tests exercising the user interface. Tests that provide the quickest feedback and fault precision serve as the testing foundation. So, how does this work in practice? How does a team achieve this level of test automation and maintain it over time? How can the team avoid redundancy in the various test layers? Jim Weaver demonstrates the different types of tests for a real feature—enforcing business rules for...

In chess, the word blunder means a very bad move by someone who should know better. Even though functional test automation has been around for a long time, people still make some very bad moves and serious blunders. The most common misconception in automation is thinking that manual testing is the same as automated testing. And this thinking accounts for most of the blunders in system level test automation. Dorothy Graham takes us on a tour of these blunders, including: the Stable-Application Myth (you can’t start automating until the application is stable), Inside-the-Box Thinking (...

Do you ever sit in test strategy or test plan review sessions and get little or no participation from others? Are you looking for a better way to communicate important information around the test plan or strategy? Do you want your stakeholders to understand and engage in providing feedback and suggestions? Jennifer Bonine and Karen Schaefer have a solution for you—a mind mapping tool that can help you address these questions. A Mind Map is a visual approach used to help organize information rather than a text outline or list. Jennifer and Karen will help you download a free mind mapping...

Think of manually executed test scripts—like pulling a wagon without wheels. Eventually the wagon will make it to the final destination, but the journey itself will be long and painful. Many people think test scripts are outdated because of the long, painful process of writing and running them. Andrea Fox says that their analytics team shared this way of thinking. To make things worse, the team also was dealing with defects being constantly introduced because the restrictive scripts were not catching the issues. Change was vital to provide more efficiency in manual testing, as well...

Service virtualization provides many benefits for both development and test teams. For testers, service virtualization empowers them to work in parallel with their development counterparts and take control of their own schedules. They no longer have to wait for development to complete their work or to get access to a restricted system such as a mainframe or a third party API. Test teams can get the basic details from dev and/or use a sample request and response pair to create a virtual service themselves. With no need to wait on others to start testing, testing can start at...

Are you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your existing teams’ programming skills and technical abilities without bringing in external resources—and still meet your daily release deliverables? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming the QA department at iCIMS into a Test Engineering Center of Excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply appropriate automation technologies to...

Mary Thorn has had the opportunity in the past twenty years to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization where she has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile...

Creating automated tests for your team stories, integration, or regression test cycles within agile sprints is almost every tester’s top challenge. Usually it consumes many hours and requires a great deal of effort to achieve, especially in complex and large agile projects. Teams need to deliver software as quickly as they can while producing the best possible product quality. Talal Ibdah shows how you can achieve these goals and automate your API functional and performance tests; define test environments and configuration files; make chaining requests; continuously deliver your...

A lot of folks doing testing (QAs, BAs, and Devs alike) are experienced with testing applications through the front end—a graphical user interface or a mobile app. However, Hilary Weaver-Robb says that with this type of testing we often miss the internal web services and APIs that power those applications. Integration or web service tests are right in the middle of the Testing Pyramid, so to ensure adequate coverage it’s vital for testers to know how to test at that level. Thankfully, to test web services we can apply many of the same principles we already know. Hilary focuses on...

Today, three things are undeniable facts of business—projects are becoming more agile, teams are learning to function well remotely, and the tester’s role is evolving. Mike Hrycyk believes that testers in agile teams face daunting challenges and often struggle to keep up with the pace of new feature development while performing all the needed regression testing activities. Mike offers a strategy as an alternate path: the creation of a regression testing team to augment feature teams, one that works in parallel, handling the testing regression cycle while the feature teams—...

You may have heard the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month … or that it isn’t part of DevOps … or that it isn’t for cloud-based applications. Marianne Hollier says that continuous testing means adopting the right set of automated tests along with service virtualization, which allows the team to simulate missing dependencies and to start testing earlier and more frequently. She shares how the right combination of best practices and tools can help software development and testing teams adopt a continuous testing approach. Since you can’t test...

Machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence, is gaining widespread adoption and interest on software development projects. Paul Merrill says that ML isn't typical programming. Algorithms can be changed and checked for accuracy at runtime to “learn” from data. Some companies are already generating and executing test cases using machine learning algorithms. It is projected that significant areas of the labor force—16 percent in transportation and 9 percent of healthcare—could see job cuts in the next few years. So it's time to start thinking: Might testing be on that...

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and...

Thursday, October 5

Software engineering as a discipline has come a long way. For some teams, months-long cycles of dev-test-build-release have shrunk down to mere days—or even hours. In the fastest, leanest organizations, most testing happens in parallel with development as part of a slick, continuous integration pipeline. Come along with Melissa Benua as she explores just how quickly and safely a product can be released using ultramodern engineering technologies. All testers know how to file a bug, but more testers should know how to configure a continuous integration (CI) pipeline tool, how to wrest code...

Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series. A high-school football coach, devoted to statistical analysis, has won three state championships—by never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars for the purpose of eking out seconds during the course of a race....

For testers, creating tests is critical for a healthy testing process, so it is painful to see how boring writing test cases can be. In classical approaches, test cases are overcrowded with words—mostly project information that everyone already knows. What test cases don’t have is distilled information that allows testers to focus on the core functionality. Hipo has recently changed their approach to writing test documentation. Ömürden Cengiz believes that checklists are poised to take the throne from test cases, especially among startups and client-servicing shops where projects...

Automation is a powerful tool to help testing but too often it is used to replicate existing manual tests. This leads organizations to spend large amounts of time and money constantly updating flaky automated tests and test teams to suffer frustration from having to focus on activities that are not truly testing. This cost and frustration can be avoided by using automation as a tool to assist testing—not to replace tests. Jeffrey Martin shares some real-world examples of using automation to supplement testing by leveraging its true value—the replication and repetition of tasks...

Automated acceptance testing is an essential component of a healthy agile software development process. Unfortunately, attempts to adopt this approach in mobile often result in slow, brittle, and highly complex device tests, based on UI automation. This approach harms confidence in mobile development. Automation used in this way often creates more problems than it solves, leaving development teams and businesses wondering where it all went wrong—often blaming tools rather than their approach. Revisiting fundamentals via a simple example of a mobile app, Paul Stringer helps us re-...

The concept of “shifting testing left” in the software development lifecycle is not new. Shifting testing from manual to automated and then upstream into engineering is a driving factor in DevOps and agile software development. However, Michael Nauman wonders why test automation, DevOps, and agile software development still frequently fail to deliver on their promises? Aligning and hardening your DevOps and test automation—along with streamlining your agile processes—is critical to your project. Michael shares how AutoCAD’s shifting testing left enabled improvements within their...

All testers have users with unique needs. Are these needs included in your requirements? Lisa denDekker-Redemann says that was not always the case at UPS. Were we testing the mobile systems that our crew members use like we should? Sometimes to get it right, we have to go out into the wild—or in our case, out into the wild blue yonder. To get the whole story (and awesome test coverage), we boarded an aircraft to design scripts and test live 18,000 feet in the air. We found real conditions our users face that didn’t make the user stories and test conditions. Lisa shares why she went into...

Selenium has an industry reputation of being a “flaky” tool where individual tests pass, then fail—sometimes with no production changes at all. Such flakiness in your test suites can be extremely difficult, time consuming, and frustrating to debug. The vast majority of these issues stem from using either bad locators or bad wait conditions. But both of these root causes can be addressed by implementing the right framework for your Selenium tests. Craig Schwarzwald shares the most important concepts in creating such a Selenium framework. He has proved that using a framework...

Your company has decided to move into the 21st century and is developing a shiny new mobile app. But you don’t know where to start. How many devices do you need to test? Can you take existing tests and modify them? How do you account for conditions such as loss of connectivity, a virtual keyboard, and new user interactions? What about the questions you don’t even know to ask? Join Bambi Rands as she introduces you to the world of mobile testing. Learn from Bambi’s first-hand experience testing mobile apps and building a mobile test strategy. Discuss the shift from testing web...

Communication breakdowns are a primary cause of IT project failure. Marcia Buzzella believes increasing the success rate of IT projects across waterfall, Agile, and DevOps methods requires a balance of social (soft) and technical (hard) capabilities to improve team performance. Social interactions among team members facilitate knowledge sharing, build relationships, promote trust, and—perhaps most importantly—align expectations. Unfortunately, the fast pace of technological change prompts many software test professionals to prioritize the improvement of technical capabilities over...

Every year, VMware has hundreds of releases for its virtualization products that cover data centers, networking, storage, cloud management, and digital workspace. Testing many different products while adapting to their development lifecycle introduces some special challenges for the product globalization team. Vincent Truong describes the processes and testing techniques a large-size software company needs to correctly support the globalization of its products. Vincent examines the agile process of globalization—internationalization and localization—testing and how the test...

Ensuring a website will scale with excellent performance under peak levels of load is no easy task. Any number of problems can occur—from switch hardware failure to third party service outages, to a poor choice of algorithms or memory use in the code. Melissa Chawla describes Shutterfly's three-tiered approach to prevent site outages during peak load. First, check the development team's designs for scalability by holding performance design reviews for each project including identifying throughput requirements for all down-stream resources. Second, automate continuous load testing...

Walk the Expo, and you will see all kinds of test automation tools. Some run scripts. Some communicate with the system under test. Some virtualize system components. Some do interesting things that you may never have considered. Yet, none gives you a complete recipe for testing your product and synthesizing the results. That is not their job. It's yours. Mike Duskis says an effective test automation program will reflect the unique nuances of your product and your business. However, unique nuances need not add up to radically different architectures. In fact, effective automation...

The age of the Internet of Things (IoT) has come. IoT devices enable a new realm of services and applications—medical devices, fitness and fashion, appliances, industrial, etc. The market is expected to exceed $1.7 trillion by 2020 with more than 200 billion connected devices—and 90 percent of automobiles. Join Amir Rozenberg as he describes the ingredients to ensure quality IoT applications: IoT-enabled lab, test tools and methodologies, and compliance and test evidence. Test professionals need to expand their perspective to include IoT; new IoT dev testers need to adopt proven...

When people hear about my past jobs, my career, and the many places I “work” (at foreign conferences and even on ski lifts), I often get the question “How do I get your job?” However, when people hear some of the details of my career, their reaction is “Gee, that’s a lot of work!” Well, yes, but that does not mean that hard work is not fun. Jon Hagar presents a career map that contains his secrets to getting, keeping, and growing in the fun and exciting career of software testing. These include getting started with learning, seeking challenges, sustaining passion, finding...

Even seemingly simple software systems can be a dense forest of intersecting logical pathways which may leave you wondering if your testing was robust enough. Traditional test cases are flawed since they only execute the pathways the tester considered at the time the test case was written, and they will execute the same way—every time and without variation. Jon Fetrow shows how, using model-based testing, you can create a map of your software forest and answer the question “Did you test enough?” Jon discusses the use of models to catch defects in the requirements and design phase...

Container-based and microservices architectures have become the ideal setting for faster development cycles and more robust applications. As companies shift to these technologies, an integral part of the solution is the development of a continuous performance testing pipeline. Adopting a containerized architecture presents a variety of challenges. There are concerns about introducing additional overhead into the application performance. At the same time, a new paradigm implies defining new testing strategies, new metrics, and new tools that can better adapt to these architectures....

Is your company spending a lot of time and effort on an automation strategy while your customers believe that product quality has not improved? Does management see automation as a silver bullet that will save money, increase coverage, and reduce headcount? Do you work for a company where the goal is (almost) 100 percent test automation? Paul Holland discusses issues and problems with these approaches and perceptions about test automation. He provides strong arguments why the “automate everything” approach is not likely to be successful and provides details of an alternative, balanced...

In the past few years, deployment of applications in the cloud has become an industry standard. Meher Nori believes that it is very important for QA/testing organizations to understand the impact the cloud may have on them and prepare accordingly. The impact primarily involves a change in the testing strategy, and two items become very important. (1) Security testing and elasticity/scalability testing—new types of tests which previously were not so important—need to be created and executed once an application is hosted in the cloud. (2) Some traditional tests—availability testing...

To be a well-rounded and analytical tester, Adam Satterfield says you should learn to code. Learning to code empowers a tester to be more self-reliant and less dependent on someone else to write their test scripts, which can take valuable time from the critical and time-crunched testing process. Learning to code positions a tester for long-term career growth, opens up new professional opportunities, and gives them the perspective to be a better tester with a deeper understanding of what questions to ask and how to approach a meaningful testing plan to gain better insights. However...

Most enterprises have legacy code that needs to be rewritten to keep pace with industry standards, new technologies, and modern infrastructures. The primary purpose of an enterprise software rewrite is to ensure functional compatibility before retiring a legacy system. However, replacing large, complex, bread-and-butter legacy systems is a risky and costly project endeavor, frequently resulting in projects failing, being shelved, or abandoned. Software rewrites face significant challenges due to detailed code requirements, legacy infrastructure, and lack of support. Umang Nahata...